For Fraser Brown

People are necessarily treading carefully around the news that Gordon Brown's son Fraser has cystic fibrosis. His daughter, Jennifer, was born prematurely and died soon afterwards. That was, of course, easily described as a tragedy. To describe Fraser's affliction as a tragedy would be to insult the life of a child who may well live for many years. What also cannot be said is that this humanises a politician not known for his approachability and warmth. That involves the child in a political calculus. But, speaking from some experience, what can be said is that the role of the severely handicapped is to remind us that we are all handicapped. The only real crime is not to know this.

More Death

It's hard not to be gripped by the American Way of Death - the embalmed and exposed cadavers, the vast 'memorial parks', the baroque euphemisms, the whole Loved One palaver. And there is something consoling about the fact that this culture has spread to the internet in the form of online memorial web sites. Here is an example, complete with music. Unlike most Brits - including, of course, Evelyn Waugh and Jessica Mitford - I don't sneer at all this as evidence of Yank vulgarity and commercialism. In fact, I think the American attachment to elaborate rites is preferable to our detachment. A very great book indeed - Philippe Aries' The Hour of Our Death - explains why far better than I can. But, in a nutshell, secular society, deprived of the rites of death, resorts to the lonely technological death, free of all consolation. The Americans have their rites, we have our tongue-tied, embarrassed friends and relatives, waiting in quiet desperation for the earliest decent moment to leave. Anyway, while I am on the subject, it seems death is a problem for bloggers and other online hoodlums. They take their passwords to their grave. Their virtual identities, their work, their lives are locked in the immaterial vault of the web. Like ghosts, in fact, or souls in limbo. We need a web Dante to visit them. Oh and Harvard says bacon sandwiches can kill you. Have a good one and, hey, let's be careful out there.

There's a Divinity That Shapes Our Ends

It's hard not to believe that Hamlet has a point when Allen Carr dies of lung cancer. Carr gave up a 100-a-day habit 23 years ago and went on, apparently, to cure millions of their nicotine addiction. But it's difficult to know exactly what the Divinity is up to here. Qutting smoking and saving others should, perhaps, have saved him from such a death. On the other hand, the message could be that the weed will always get you, so don't even start. Or something. I am more at ease with the death of Jim Fixx in 1984. He was the great prophet of jogging for health - we would rightly call it running now as jogging is a most horrible word, suggestive of an unwise bouncing movement that would inevitably result in skeletal damage. Fixx, of course, died of a heart attack while running. He was 52. Very neat of the Divinity if He is against running on principle. But I think His real point was that Fixx, in his Complete Book of Running, invoked Mao-Tse Tung as an authority. The old mass murderer approved of running. But, if there is one thing of which we can be sure, it is that Mao angered the Divinity more than any other human being. So, if you want to live a long time, don't smoke at all and never say anything nice about Mao. Obviously.

Personally, of course, I Regret Everything

Tony Blair expressed 'deep sorrow' for slavery. He didn't actually say he was sorry. This was wise. If there are going to be apologies for slavery then Africans - chiefs sold slaves - and Arabs - very enthusiastic traders - should also be bowing their heads. And, of course, slavery was finally banned because of the British. Meanwhile, Tim Willis in the First Post suggests the Romans should apologise for their invasion. This may have been 2,000 years ago but the British still haven't recovered from the 'collective trauma' that ensued. In addition, the Romans enslaved 100,000 of us. Willis does not go far enough. To my delight - see this post - we seem to have discovered that Norwegians served in the Roman legions. I have always wanted to wring an apology out of Oslo. But what about the French? They invaded in 1066 and I have had a slight headache ever since. Speaking of which, the Dutch have always made me uneasy. Who do they think they are? And don't get me started on the Swiss. Or the Austrians. I'll apologise for the British Empire - maybe - if they'll apologise for being annoying. And, ohmygod, cake-muffins! Just say it, America. Sorry. And I apologise to everybody I've ever offended in this blog. Except Yvette Cooper. And Ed Vaizey. And Richard Dawkins. And Jeffrey Archer.
*The wonderful headline, since you ask, is not mine but Samuel Beckett's.
**Good grief! And I just discovered this site. Go there and apologise now.

Email Manners and Ed Vaizey

I have just received an email from Ed Vaizey, Shadow Minister for the Arts. It asks: 'Where's your post on the death (and rebirth) of newspapers?' Leaving aside the fact that the post is on my blog in plain sight under the pretty much self-explanatory headline The Death of Print?, I want to draw your attention to the form of this Vaizey mail. His question is posed in the subject line. The body of the mail contains only his name, his title and his constituency (Wantage and Didcot, a jaunty pairing to my ear). This, I find, bloody rude. Emails can be fast and casual, but not one from a prominent politician sent to somebody he has never met. It's like being yelled at across the street - 'Oi, you, where's your post....?' etc. So just to say, 'Oi, Vaizey, get your frigging act together.'

An Important Contribution to the Polly Toynbee Debate

To the Cafe Royal - how often I have dreamed of writing those words! - for the International PEN quiz, dinner etc. I am on the Literary Review - 'An oasis of civilisation amidst the desert of cool Britannia.' B.Appleyard - team, which never wins but always has a much better time than anybody else. One of us, the great and gentle Alexander Waugh, grows increasingly angry at the dim-witted tackiness of the whole affair. PEN is supposedly a noble organisation with noble goals, yet the evening feels like any annual party of any company with a drunken lout recruitment policy. Knowing we are losing, Alexander and I agree that our preferred tactic is to give the same answer to every question - Polly Toynbee. We cannot persuade the rest of our table. During the picture round, however, which requires the identification of fragments of book jackets, a blonde lady from another table pleads with us to tell her the name of one book, any book, represented. We tell her that Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is, in fact, My Struggle by Polly Toynbee. This makes blonde happy. Alexander and I are flooded with a deep inner peace. For one brief moment, we have been true to PEN's highest ideals.

Diana

I reported the funeral of Princess Diana. Perhaps I went a little over the top. But I had just 80 minutes to write the piece and, inside the Abbey, only the dead kings would have been immune to some kind of intense emotion. Possibly my report would have depressed political blogger Stephen Tall. It seems internal BBC research has shown that 44 per cent of the population thought that media coverage of Diana's death was excessive and over-emotional. This, it seems, made them feel 'alienated'. Tall himself says he felt 'utterly disenfranchised'. These words are absurd. If such news coverage makes you feel alienated, then you must be pretty alienated to start with. If it makes you feel 'utterly disenfranchised', then your political sensitivities and your language are out of control. Now, here we go again, next year there is to be a charity concert to mark the tenth anniversary of Diana's death. This will re-start the attacks of the hard-ass right on the 'soppy' Diana cult and the attacks of the touchy-feely left on the 'cold' institution of the monarchy and the oppressive class system, yaddy-yadda-ya. I've been on both sides for the purposes of getting through dull dinner parties. In hard-ass mode, I agree that Diana and her entourage were a bunch of flakes. In touchy-feely mode, I accept that she seems to have been tortured. One book I reviewed, however, made me realise that my feelings on the matter were irrelevant. In The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, Michael Collins shows, among other things, how such mass acts of mourning are a distinct tradition within the London working class. They confirm identity and perpetuate consoling stories of community and solidarity. After reading Collins, I abandoned my posturing. I am neutral on Diana for the simple reason that she was not meant for me. She was meant for people who had much more urgent needs and reasons to belong.

I Am Not the World's Oldest Blogger

You probably all knew about this guy before I did, but, for me, it is a very consoling discovery. Good ol' Don is the world's oldest blogger. Will I blog on to my nineties? Will Jeffrey? All I can say is that I just bought my first pair of Converse All Stars, clear though disturbing proof, if any were needed, that I am not dead yet.

Jeffrey Archer - I Know, I'm Sorry

You people bring out the worst in me. Maxine, for example, draws my attention to this. He's downright viral this Archer. This is, in fact, odd because his blog is ranked only 2.6 millionth in the world, well below my own obscure and cantankerous offering. He just doesn't post enough, I guess, but when he does.... Consider, for example, the lyrical This Week's News with which he left us prior to departing for Australia. It contains the disturbing report that one prize in a charity auction he is conducting out there consists of 'a box for every day of the Sydney Test.' He can't surely mean....
(For my American readers, 'a box' in cricket is, I believe, the same as 'a cup' in baseball. Or it used to be. I see now they are called Anatomic Abdominal Guards. When did that happen? When muffins became cakes probably.)

Me, Me, Me 2

Two more Sunday Times pieces, I'm afraid. One about management consultants in government and one about a new wave of popular science books. I don't know how I do it what with this blog and all.